Sunday, 18 March 2007

The new totalitarianism

The latest target of the Immigration Industry in the UK is a distinguished demographer, Prof. David Coleman of Oxford University. (I know he looks a bit of a bollicks, but read on). The industry representative on this occasion was the ‘Student Action for Refugees’ with the inappropriate acronym ‘STAR’. They wanted the Prof fired. His crime? His research revealed that the economic benefits of immigration were largely illusory. They claimed such findings would generate ‘hate’ (don't ask!) towards refugees. So he must be fired!

Coleman himself explained ‘I put my head above the parapet because I was alarmed at what I saw as an increasing tendency by official spokesmen, political and others, to present a somewhat partial interpretation of statistics on migration, to reinvent the migration history of Britain in ways that supported the official case, and to present analyses of the advantages of the economic and demographic effects of migration which tended to ignore its drawbacks’.

So you do peer-reviewed research that comes up with the ‘wrong’ answer and you can be fired. As your Savant has frequently pointed out, this is the mirror-image of Communism and other forms of totalitarianism. And as with all forms of totalitarianism, there are stakeholders whose positions depend on it. In the case of the immigration industry you have a plethora of organisations (Google ireland asylum support and you’ll get 1.3 million hits) founded on public money and largely unaccountable for how it is spent, plus lawyers, immigration officers, prison warders, property owners and a posse of others who want the good times to keep rolling.It’ll be interesting to see how all this pans out in the forthcoming economic meltdown.